John Fowles's opening chapter [in Daniel Martin] is rich and promising. His stated aim is to offer "an exploration of what it means to be English", and his epigraph from Antonio Gramsci ("The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears") promises an objective diagnosis of English decline. Succeeding chapters set in California and Oxford seem to have a fairly sure grasp of cultural realities and limitations—Los Angeles is described as "those famous hundred suburbs in search of a city", and Oxford is "not a city, but an incest." But then [a] feeling of too-familiar recognition … begins to deepen…. [The] trouble is that Fowles's narrative technique is so self-conscious it seems like a form of self-abuse—it's reminiscent of Isherwood's unbearably narcissistic Christopher and His Kind—while the...